LO­CAL TRIVIA

Im­press friends back home with a piece of trivia about Santa Rosa. The col­or­ful town of Mil­ton ap­par­ently car­ried some more de­scrip­tive names in the past. Among them were Jerni­gan’s Land­ing, named af­ter an 1830s pi­o­neer named Ben­jamin Jerni­gan; Scratch An­kle, which re­ferred to the re­sults in­flicted by bri­ars grow­ing along the banks of the Black­wa­ter River; Hard Scrab­ble; and even­tu­ally, Mill Town, be­cause of the lum­ber mill that em­ployed many cit­i­zens, which was even­tu­ally short­ened to Mil­ton.